The Fraternity Of Metaphors, Jean-Luc Godard

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Jean-Luc Godard occupies a central place in the history of cinema and in contemporary debates about art and visual thought. With a catalogue of at least two hundred films and videos, not to mention his abundant writings, interviews and visual art works, his output is one of the most important and decisive of the last hundred years. 

Godard showed us that images can be tools for openness and connection as well as for comparison and analysis, that ideas in cinema function better as a point of arrival than departure, and that films should not merely become circulation channels, but rather projections that allow us to think about them. Any practice or reflection on the form, uses and scope of images today must engage with his work. 

Among the filmmakers of his generation, he was certainly the one who most tenaciously returned to the recent past. The traumas of the Second World War and the extermination camps, the realization that humanity was under threat on an unprecedented scale because of the violence of war, are evident throughout his filmography, from his first short film, Operation Concrete (1954-55), to his final completed work, Trailer of a Film That Will Never Exist: “Phony Wars” (2022). 

Recalling what it meant to see images of the Spanish Civil War on a cinema screen in France in the early 1950s, a country still reeling from the horrors of the previous decade and bleeding from colonial wars, Godard spoke of a “fraternity of metaphors.” In his conception of the role that images are meant to play, these relate to one another as thinking forms with the capacity to rebel against oppression. “The text makes the law. Images are by no means making laws today; you can add any commentary to them: they are docile; they are kind [...]. It is still with speeches that tyrants brutalize and exploit the people.” 

It was through the unusual combination of images and sounds that he therefore proposed to intervene, almost always controversially, in the conflicts of his time: Algeria, Vietnam, Palestine and Yugoslavia. “A film is a theoretical rifle and a rifle a practical film. Fortunately I don’t have any gun for I am so short-sighted that I would probably kill all my friends. I have the impression I’m less myopic in a film.” 

A conscientious objector in two countries for his refusal to serve in both the French and Swiss armies, his only indirect knowledge of war did not prevent him from reflecting on it in a way that no other filmmaker did. His great meditation on the history of the 20th century and the historiographical capacity of films, Histoire(s) du cinéma (1987-1998), poses an equation whose unknowns are war and cinema. This monumental work led him to conclude that, “from the perspective of art history, the 20th century is the hundred years’ war.”

Until the very end, when he called for “rejecting the billions of alphabetic diktats to liberate the incessant metamorphoses and metaphors of a necessary and true language”, he believed that the critical production of new images demanded a radical overhaul that, for lack of a better term, he called “montage.” “An image, even an icon, does not wage war. It is, above all, a relationship with the other."

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